It just seems weird that people think they should have joned the Horde given what that entails. At the time “they should have joined the Horde” literally meant “they should have bent the knee and sworn fealty to the Warchief.”
'Cuz that’s what joining the Horde was. Nice Warchief or mean Warchief, that’s part of the Warchief. Irrespective of whether they’d hashed out the misunderstandings, how would it add up for them to essentially cede their sovereignty by joining a faction in which the Warchief’s commands take precedent over the governments of its constituent states?
Even as nice a guy as Thrall is, how would it have made a lick of sense for Tyrande and Malfurion to effectively subject their people to his commands as Warchief? At the very least, joining the Alliance meant being voluntarily among sovereign peers; joining the Horde means being a subject nation among other subject nations that can get branded treasonous and brought to heel if it tries to leave or act out unilaterally.
Well, no. It’s not. You swear fealty to the Warchief, and when the Warchief pisses you off, you rebel and get rid of them. Which we’ve done twice already.
And I just don’t really see how it’s any different than bending the knee and swearing fealty to the High King.
To be fair the Alliance had also just saved the world alongside the Night Elves and Horde haha. It probably wouldn’t have been unreasonable at that point to feel hopeful about world piece, despite the tensions.
It makes sense, to me at least, that the Night Elves would regard the Alliance, who by and large treated them very well, as trusted friends after the Battle of Mount Hyjal. The Horde, by contrast, had killed an important deity/Demigod, after intentionally drinking a bunch of felblood, all while defiling their forests. Even after that amazing victory, there had to be at least some degree of wariness directed towards the Horde.
But I agree that they certainly weren’t “foreign invaders” at that point. The Night Elves and Early Horde had clearly come to a diplomatic understanding by the time of Hyjal, and thus, before WoW.
Oh absolutely. At that point, diplomatically, the Horde and the Alliance should have been roughly equal in the eyes of the NEs. They’re both strange foreign powers from across the sea, but they both just helped them defeat the Legion.
But strategically, there is no contest there. One group lives on your doorstep and outnumbers you, like, 3 to 1. The other group, as I like to keep mentioning…lives half a planet away.
And culturally, you actually have some common ground with the Orcs, Tauren and Trolls in regards to nature and it’s various spirits and worship thereof. Of which the races of the Alliance have almost no investment in.
Orcs are refugees from the world who died in wars, camps, storms.
Darkspear trolls are a shard of one of the Empires attacked by the Naga Witch and Proudmoore.
I’m not sure about the tauren. It seems to me that there have always been few of them.
The dark trolls haven’t joined the Horde, have they?
When I say 3-to-1, I was just referring to the number of races. Not the actual populations of those races. As we have no way of knowing what those numbers actually are.
To me, the defining difference was the orcs, and the orcs alone.
The Alliance had not really launched any attacks on Ashenvale, at any point. The Horde did. Yes, they reconciled, but the Night Elves would’ve surely been wary of the obviously-fel-tainted creatures that’d openly and willingly ingested fel blood and killed Cenarius. That’s the sort of thing that causes tensions, even if you’re not outright enemies.
Furthermore the Horde’s power base was, as you’ve mentioned, in Kalimdor. The Night Elves have traditionally been a reclusive people, not really engaging in international diplomacy pre-Alliance. They had amicable enough relations with the Tauren, and the Cenarion Circle fully accepted them, but they weren’t exactly friends. If they were close allies I don’t think the Kaldorei would’ve stood by and done nothing as the Centaur butchered the Tauren people to the point of near-extinction.
So why join the Alliance? Maybe that very distance between Teldrassil and Stormwind was something they saw as an advantage. They have a union and friends at their back if the orcs do, by chance, get violent again. Yet at the same time, they receive little to no outside interference because the sheer distance of it all makes it difficult. (This is even seen a bit in BFA where Darkshore and Teldrassil are simply too far away for Anduin to provide meaningful help until Zandalar is first knocked out of the picture.)
I guess the crux of it all is that the Night Elves were, in my opinion, wary of the orcs and the Alliance provided them with extra surety against future Orcish aggression, as more and more of them began to show up and establish themselves.
Does the three-to-one argument make sense? The maximum is that this will give a variety of weapons practices and types of troops.
It’s okay, there are a variety of druids, dryads and it is not clear where disappeared chimeras.
Orcs: It varies. The main, initial thrust came from liberated internment camps in Lordaeron who fled across the sea with Thrall. How’d they get so populated? Blizz doesn’t, to my knowledge, really give us details on that. At the very least we know that more orcs joined in the Garrosh era, as Garrosh accepted a lot of former “Dark Horde” members into his ranks.
Trolls: Island in the Sea
Tauren: Already on Kalimdor
Forsaken: Dead Humans and Elves and a few leper gnomes for some reason
I feel like if the NEs had actually requested from the Horde anything in regards to apologies or assistance rebuilding what they destroyed, Thrall would have gladly provided those in exchange for all the benefits having the NEs in the Horde would have provided(consolidation of control of Kalimdor, not having a hostile power along his borders, resources he wouldn’t have to sacrifice lives for, etc.)
Except really, it did the exact opposite of that. Joining the Alliance was essentially an open declaration that you are the Horde’s enemy. And the “extra surety” was too far away to be of any actual assistance, as the War of Thorns proved.
You see, I didn’t know you were specifically referring to the Pre-Classic Horde! As such, I responded to your inquiry about where the Horde came from in a more general sense.
My sincere apologies for any miscommunication old boy!
Because nobody’s been bending the knee and swearing fealty to the High King (other than Stormwind, which is loyal to him as King of Stormwind, not as High King of the Alliance.) If Tyrande had done what she did in BfA as part of the Horde instead - rejecting the faction leader’s war strategy to his face and running off to do things her way - by all pre-council precedent her behavior would be considered treasonous. She’d be not a head of state refusing a peer, but a member of the Horde betraying her Warchief.
Because even with a friendly Warchief, the baked-in structure of the position is despotic in function and supercedes the sovereignty of member races with loyalty to the Horde first and foremost. Even the recruitment of the taunka has this weird, disturbingly faction-jingoistic bent to it, as instead of gaining their official loyalty by appealing to their chieftain, the player effectively runs around having individual taunka swear a blood oath to serve the Horde above all else, with no consideration for loyalty to their own tribe.
It’s why the rebellions were such a problem. Cairne and Vol’jin considered Thrall a friend, while Sylvanas and Lor’themar considered him a measured and reasonable person, but as soon as a different person assumed the position it became swiftly apparent that they - and through them, their respective peoples - were all fundamentally subjects of the Warchief institution, and exerting their own sovereignty at odds with whoever wore that mantle was treason and not just political allies each looking out for their own peoples’ well-being.
The fact that it took a rebellion and outright coup against Garrosh just to assert their own sovereignty again (after which they went right back to another Warchief…) showed that with a Warchief in charge, none of the Horde races really had any sovereignty at all. And they only fully realized that with Sylvanas’ ouster, whereupon they instituted the council to preserve their own respective autonomy without any single dictatorial figure possessing the institutional power to override them all.
It just strikes me as extremely contrary to the night elf character to sign on with any faction that lionizes and institutionalizes obedience to a Warchief over loyalty to everything else. Homeland, family, Nature, Elune; all of that would be subordinate to serving the Horde. They’d sooner not pick a side at all.
Sure? Thrall refused to investigate the eviscerated corpses so as not to have the consequences of an embittered people. Why wouldn’t the orcs be angry if forced to apologize? Honor and all that.
Yeah but put yourself in their shoes. The Night Elves were so wary of magic they didn’t even allow arcane at the time, and then they encounter these big green, already fel corrupted monsters from another world who chop down all their trees, willingly drink felblood, kill one of their literal gods, and then say sorry.
Like, if it was your elderly grandma’s little small town church and a satanist with face tattoos walks in, sacrifices a goat, spraypaints “i <3 satan” on the walls, then says “oh right sorry don’t know what came over me, I’ll help clean up if you want” grandma is still gonna be a little bit nervous, even if she’s not outright hostile at that point lol
Yeah, it’s not a good system, and they got rid of it eventually.
Maybe they’d have even gotten rid of it sooner if the NEs had been there to go “This system is dumb.”
Alternatively, you could have ended up with Warchief Tyrande. There’s a good chance that after Garrosh was overthrown, she would have been given the position over Vol’jin.
I mean…in fairness, they started drinking the felblood and killed their god(though not really, the guy was fine after awhile) after the NEs immediately started killing them for gathering firewood.
Kinda more if it was your elderly grandma’s little small town church and a satanist with face tattoos walks in and starts taking vegetables out of her garden and she shoots him.
Like, yeah, he shouldn’t be stealing veg, but dial it back a notch granny.
Oh yeah but if you’re putting yourselves in the night elves shoes, which is important for them deciding their political allegiance, they think they only did that to protect the forest.
Someone needed to get Taran Zhu in here to talk to them about reprisals.
Are Orcs really that open to other people’s opinions? The 300-year-old Dark Naaru is probably not the same as the more recent (thirty?) Governance reform, but “one’s” is usually defended, even if it is wrong.
Indeed you’re correct old chap!